Mineola OKs Cross Street school lease

Richard Tedesco

In an emotionally charged meeting, the Mineola Board of Education voted unanimously on Thursday night to approve an agreement for the Solomon Schechter Day School of Glen Cove to lease the Cross Street School for five years starting in September.

The lease deal, which includes a five-year renewal option, covers both the Williston building and the school’s baseball fields, which will remain available for little league and CYO teams on a limited basis while Solomon Schechter is in session. Approval of the agreement is first step in a consolidation plan that calls for the closing of the Cross Street and Willis Avenue schools.

Williston Park residents, including members of the Cross Street Alliance, a grassroots group recently formed to lobby for a community center on Cross Street, strenuously objected to the lease citing concerns about traffic safety and congestion from 36 vehicles that will be used to transport Schechter students.

Their public comments were preceded by a presentation of the traffic study it commissioned from VHB Engineering, Surveying and Landscpae Architecture, a firm recommended by the Williston Park Village Board, and a presentation on Solomon Schechter’s transportation plans from Rabbi Lev Hernnson, the CEO and head of school at Solomon Schecther.

“I’m satisfied that the board did due diligence on the traffic study,” Trustee John McGrath said before the vote. “It’s one of those situations where everybody’s going to walk away a little unhappy. I think Schechter needs time to prepare for September.”

Board president Terence Hale agreed with McGrath that the board had done its “due diligence” in commissioning the study. That rare moment of amity between members of a frequently divided board was followed by a unanimous vote on the Cross Street lease. marking the initial phase of the board’s consolidation plans to ultimately close and lease two schools.

Over the past several months, the board that has been firmly divided over consolidation, McGrath had said he intended to block plans to close the Willis Avenue School.

But the consolidation issue appeared to be resolved by the 432-vote plurality that approved next year’s school budget and the landslide victories of Hale and Trustee William Hornberger, who supported the consolidation plan.

Hale and Hornberger were unsuccessfully challenged by Veronica Levitan and Joseph Manopella, who both said they had serious reservations about the consolidation plan.

The budget included a $2.6 million capital improvement expenditure to enlarge and upgrade the Hampton Street School and the Meadow Drive School to prepare them as schools for grades K through 2 for the 2012-13 school year in the second consolidation phase.

Hernnson said Schechter will comply with the traffic study’s, which recommends staggering the start and dismissal times by 20 minutes between the Schechter School and nearby St. Aidan School on Willis Avenue and releasing buses departing from Schechter at dismissal time over 10 minutes. He said Solomon Schechter’s starting bell for classes would be at 7:40 a.m., 20 minutes before the St. Aidan bell sounds at 8 a.m. The school he said would also dismiss students at 3:26 p.m., 20 minutes before St. Aidan, and its buses would depart at day’s end – as suggested in the study.

“This is a hardship for us,” Herrnson said of the early start time. But he said the Schechter School wanted to ensure everyone’s safety, avoid traffic problems and to show its good will toward the community.

“We want to demonstrate that we want to be good neighbors,” Herrnson said.

Hernnson said students would be prohibited from driving to school until Solomon Schechter find space for them to park. Students have already been told that they would be punished by the school if they were found to be driving to school before then, Hernnson said.

Herrnson said he had three conversations with Rev. James McDonald about the transition at the Cross Street School and one conversation with St. Aidan’s principal Eileen Oliver about the transistion. He said McDonald had given him license to convey a message: “His only concern is for the safety of everyone involved.”

Despite the traffic study’s findings, Williston Park residents expressed concerns over prospective traffic tie-ups, particularly at the school day’s end, when most of the buses will travel east or west on Hillside Avenue from Cross Street and potential danger for their children walking to school at St. Aidan.

“I beg you not to sign this lease, ” said Crista Mills, a Cross Street Alliance leader, adding “I understand the sense in putting them there.”

Mills said the traffic problems from Solomon Schechter’s presence on Cross Street would adversely affect the “quality of life” for Williston Park residents.

A few of the residents made a point of dismissing any impression that there was a religious or racial bias informing their objections to the private conservative Jewish school locating in the village.

“I’m very upset about this racial thing,” Mary Conway. “It’s not about Catholics and Jews. It’s about safety.”

The issue of bias surfaced when someone inserted a flyer in the Sunday bulletin at St. Aidan saying that Mineola Superintendent of Schools Michael Nagler was renting the school to a “yeshiva,” a Jewish seminary school, and exhorting residents to attend what became a raucous village board meeting about it in Williston Park.

Conway said she has two children attending St. Aidan and echoed other residents in calling for a “dry run” of the same type of vehicles servicing Schechter – one large bus and 35 small buses and vans – to gauge the impact at the projected.

Nagler objected to the idea, saying that the impact on traffic could only be determined when the buses start running in September.

“So I’ll take 36 SUVs and we’ll do a dry run and I don’t see what it’s going to prove,” Nagler said. “I don’t think it’s a simple answer.”

He said the school district would hire people to monitor the traffic activity and make any necessary adjustments, as recommended in the VHB study.

Howard Lutz, VHB director of transportation, said staggering the starting and dismissal times of the Schechter and St. Aidan schools would prevent “inundating the area” with bus traffic. He said the dismissal was “a little more complicated,” but a solvable problem. Lutz noted that the actual number of vehicles would not exceed current bus and auto traffic at the Cross Street School.

“You could dismiss buses in a controlled fashion so you wouldn’t be tying up traffic by not starting the buses all at once,” Lutz said.

But Conway and other residents asked Herrnson to either set Schechter’s start time at 7:30 or at 8:32, the current starting time at Cross Street to maintain a half-hour interval between the starting and dismissal times at Schechter and St. Aidan.

At the board’s request, school board attorney Jack Feldman drafted an amendment to the Cross Street resolution saying the lease agreement would be “subject to modifications as may be made with the board’s approval.”

McGrath said he’d like to see a so-called “dry run” of the buses, but added the decision to do so should be left to Nagler.

Herrnson said Schechter was incurring a hardship by starting earlier and said it would keep its start time at 7:40.

“That was the recommendation. That’s what we’re going to stick with,” he said.

Responding to a question from Conway about whether Schechter was planning to lease parking space from St. John’s Lutheran Church on Willis Avenue. Hernnson said Schechter was considering it.

When district resident Matt Mills asked if St. Aidan had been asked to make any concessions in its schedule, the meeting momentarily turned disorderly.

“It’s been there 50 years,” someone shouted out, referring to St. Aidan.

“So have I,” Mills replied.

“And what concessions have you made?” shouted Terrence Kennedy, a Cross Street Alliance leader who had earlier quizzed the board and Lutz about bus issues and accused Nagler of reneging on a promise to retain the baseball fields at Schechter for public use.

“I said I would seek to maintain the fields for public use,” Nagler said.

To dispel what he called misinformation, Nagler recounted in detail the two inquiries the district administration received from realty agencies about Cross Street and two inquiries from prospective tenants – one of whom received a tour of the elementary schools – before it received Schechter’s inquiry last August. He said he didn’t have time to prepare answers to 18 questions he’d received by e-mail six hours earlier.

Nagler reacted to criticism about leasing Cross Street for $235,000 annually – $285,000 and $275,000, respectively in the first two years – less than Schechter’s current lease of $400,00.

“Everybody’s upset that we’re not getting the same money. OK, I get that,” Nagler said. “There’s different markets.”

In a lighter moment, he chided Lutz on the brevity of the five-page traffic study.

“For $13,000, we didn’t get a lot of paper. Is this all we’re seeing for our money?”

Lutz said an “indexed” form of the study, based on traffic observations made between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. and 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. would follow.

Resident Richard Ryan, who said he worked as a traffic engineer for the Town of North Hempstead for eight years, said any traffic study without a dry run was a “sham.”

“You really don’t know what’s going to happen until you put it out there,” he said.

Fred Otto, a former school bus driver and a member of the 30-member committee which proposed the first consolidation options last year, offered a practical observation on the problem drivers would face turning left off Cross Street onto Hillside Avenue, having to then stop at the nearby railroad crossing, sound their horn and check both ways before proceeding.

“If I’m driving the bus, I’m not going east on HIllside Avenue,” Otto said.

After the Cross Street lease got the board’s unanimous nod, half of the meeting room in the Willis Avenue School – the next school to be leased – burst into applause, and the other half of the room fell silent.

Share this Article